


The Roads Between

by scribblemyname



Series: Be Compromised 2014 Promptathon [24]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Backstory, Brothers, Community: be_compromised, F/M, Fantasy AU, Recruitment, SHIELD, Spies & Assassins, dystopian au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-29
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-15 07:12:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2220210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblemyname/pseuds/scribblemyname
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is a name out of mists and wild places. It is legend in the towns at the edge of civilization, the last bastions between humanity and the Great Strangeness. Wild half-human beasts are found dead on the roads between with arrow-split eyes and hearts. Drifters and walkers blow through towns, and a quiver on a man's back will earn silence from shrewd hard-bitten scavengers as people move to give space.</p><p>There are those who wear bows and arrows not because they have the skill, but because it is a safer ward against humans than any other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Roads Between

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inkvoices](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkvoices/gifts).



> So I kept trying to write the story I had in mind for this prompt, but I had to stop, drop, and offer more background first. This one's more Clintcentric than I was planning because, you know, background.
> 
>  
> 
> Prompt by inkvoices: [SHIELD was formed to protect against the supernatural. The Great Strangeness began in the wild places and is slowly spreading across the globe, leaving people changed in its wake, or at least those who survive as villages become forests and creatures destroy lives. Humans flock to the cities, populations becoming concentrated, like gathering around campfires in the dark. Clint has arrows dipped in holy water. Natasha has silver bullets. And one of them has a secret.](http://be-compromised.livejournal.com/412023.html?thread=7797623#t7797623)

SHIELD found Clint on the other end of a bad fight in an Indian wasteland, dousing the wounds from canine claws with holy water. He had pulled his arrows out of the pack's bodies already and laid them out across the earth before him to be cleaned. They glistened with water and blood.

Agent Phil Coulson's eyes widened slightly as he looked down the row, then finally met Clint's bland look.

"It's an old weapon," Coulson finally said, mildly.

Clint shrugged. "Old legends."

He doesn't believe the old myths were all false, or the solutions buried inside of them would not work so well. Clint makes the water the way it's been done for centuries: with dust to curse, with extinguished fire to purify, and with sincere prayers to bless. He pours it on his wounds, he drinks it in place of ordinary water, and he dips his arrows and his wards in its protection.

He's still human, isn't he?

* * *

Isn't he?

* * *

Hawkeye.

It is a name out of mists and wild places. It is legend in the towns at the edge of civilization, the last bastions between humanity and the Great Strangeness. Wild half-human beasts are found dead on the roads between with arrow-split eyes and hearts. Drifters and walkers blow through towns, and a quiver on a man's back will earn silence from shrewd hard-bitten scavengers as people move to give space.

There are those who wear bows and arrows not because they have the skill, but because it is a safer ward against humans than any other.

* * *

A car swerved on a dusty road in a human town and plowed into a tree. Fire burst through the vehicle and enveloped the entire family, burning and burning as one boy dragged another out into the road. Neither wept. Neither wailed and cried with the screaming sirens of a firetruck. They hauled themselves with grunts of effort and lay watching the dead bodies of their parents wheeled away.

That was the beginning.

* * *

"I've heard a lot about you, Clint Barton," the agent told him.

Agent Phil Coulson of SHIELD was still a stranger then, just a walker in the dust behind Clint's wayward path through wilderness. He'd been scavenging, hauling, killing the monsters snapping teeth in the dark at what settlements were left. He had little to spare for SHIELD.

Clint didn't answer. He filled his canteen and tipped back a taste. The familiar flavor brought no comfort, only dark whispers in his brother's voice. 'You were lucky to be tasting the water when it hit.' Clint never called it luck.

"You have a job offer?" Clint finally asked, sparing Coulson a glance before looking pointedly at the bodies he still had to bury.

"Yes." Coulson straightened. "I have a job offer."

* * *

Meeting Natasha is like the end of a blade nicked up under his skin. There's an edge there when he looks at her, half danger, half discomfort, all something prickling pleasantly. She smiles as he laughs and they drink, exchanging war stories as if they've known each other forever rather than an hour after bringing down Chicago's worst wolf pack together.

It should bother him, knowing the people he's killed used to be human, used to have hearts and souls and hopes and dreams, but it doesn't. He knows what it is to stare into the eyes of a friend just minutes ago, now changed and trying to kill you.

"You ever use iron?" he asks her.

She shakes her head, red curls trailing down her back and smiles as if she likes him, as if she means it. "Silver's more effective for anything but fairies."

He raises his eyebrows at that. "You met fae?"

At Clint's choice of words, Natasha hesitates. She holds up her arm. "There is iron in blood."

It's not an answer. It makes him lift his shot glass and drain the alcohol and water. He knows exactly what she means.

* * *

When Clint was still young, barely into his teens, his brother Barney took him and they left the orphanage for the first place that would take them on: Carson's Carnival of Traveling Wonders. Here, they learned to work and haul, to set up and take down, to fall and to tumble, to live and to deceive. This was the place Clint took up a bow for the first time and learned the arrows and the knives and the sword.

"These are the things that will save you," their mentors told them. "These are the things people will pay you to see."

This was where Barney and Clint were taught to make holy water.

"For the roads between cities," the lady with the lions taught them. "We are never safe on the roads between."

They were too young to join the act until they weren't, too young to steal from the marks until they weren't, too young to lose so much innocence, too young to stand watch on the sides of the caravan as they traveled the roads between with arrows dipped in holy water and silver knives sheathed at their belts.

* * *

SHIELD is safe on the roads between, familiar enough with the tides of the Great Strangeness to make Clint doubt their innocence of abusing the knowledge. He has heard stories, everyone has, of governments and militaries attempting to trap the changed or even create them for their own ends. He never believed it before Natasha.

Natasha thinks she has a secret and walks in the mists of uncertainty, but to Clint, she is as stable as the sun's path and as solid as the weight of the night or the brightness of the stars that shine above it. To Clint, she is neither mist nor uncertainty and her presence is an anchor when reality slips and changes creep through wild places.

She tastes of sunlight and flowers. Sometimes in the mornings, he hears her singing softly in a voice not entirely human, but she always stops when she knows he is awake.

* * *

After the carnival had faded into the dust of memory, his and no one else's, Clint found other work—with scavengers harvesting abandoned towns before the Great Strangeness reclaimed them forever, with travelers and caravans who still needed arrows or guns to guard them on the roads between, and with men like Fury and women like Hill who fought to save the unchanged from the changed.

But he never stayed. He brushed through a town like the passing wind or walked the dust of a longer road than anyone ever sent him on.

"Kill me," Barney's soul begged him, visible just behind him in the mirror. "You owe me this."

Clint stopped the sink and poured out water from his own bottle to splash over his face. He stared into his reflection, into his brother’s. “I don’t.”

Holy water could not kill a human soul.

He watched the familiar thin line of his brother's frown through the glass.

* * *

Clint hears the whisper behind his back as he shoots arrows into targets, one after another after another. His mind’s eye sees the faces of those he had killed—his mentors, the ones who had raised him, his friends. He never missed.

* * *

He asks Natasha to join them. SHIELD is a haven in the dark of a world inhuman. SHIELD fights the changed that would harm them.

She looks at him with hesitation in her eyes and he _knows_.

"We do good work," Clint tells her softly, as though by raising his voice he will frighten her and drive her away. "You do too." It is no secret he admires her. "You could do this."

Natasha shakes her head. She stares upward at the stars over their heads, still preferring to camp on the roads between than to take refuge in cities. "Do you ever see all this wildness around you and wonder how it changes us? Anyone could be inhuman." She looks at him, as if her words are casual or unimportant.

He stares at her, wondering how much to tell her of the weight of all the death he carries. "You couldn't."

Her eyebrows come up.

He shakes his head. "You have a soul."

* * *

Clint knows these things. He has heard Barney's voice whispering darkly in his ear as he shoots arrow after arrow into targets and does not miss.

* * *

They were making the water when it hit, Barney half-immersed as he prayed, the extinguished torch tossed aside, the dust swirling over its surface. Clint was tasting the water when they heard the wind.

It was no wind. He learned in a day, in an hour, in one breathless minute what it was to feel the tides of the Great Strangeness blowing over an encampment near the wild places. He heard the screams of his friends, his family, the carnies who taught him, trained him, raised him—human shrieks ripped from inhuman cries as man became beast and creature and fae.

A roar rushed through the inside of his flesh but something cool and calm held firm. Barney—

Barney's soul shredded from his body and one lived while the other died. Clint heard the dark hoarse whisper of Barney's soul as it cried out a warning just before hot sharp pain and slick blood. Clint stared dizzily at Duquesne, his own mentor, wielding a knife and sharper claws and teeth.

He didn't think. He couldn't think. He scrambled for his bow and took up the arrows as they'd always taught.

He didn't think.

He didn't miss.

* * *

Hawkeye.

It is a legend in the streets of Paris, of Milan, of Sao Paulo, of a hundred cities scattered over the earth. It is whispered in dark places. Where the Strangeness passes, Hawkeye follows. In wild places beyond the cities, in the barren dust and lush fields of wilderness, he is a walker, a drifter, an agent.

He is not afraid of the roads between.


End file.
